View Referral Source Entry screen.

Referral Sources are persons or organizations who send patients to you. Diamond Dental Software can track these referral sources so that you know how your patients came to the office. The Referral Source Entry screen can be accessed while entering a patient or via the System Files button on the Utility Menu. You will enter your major referral sources using this screen. Referral sources might be other doctors, advertising sources such as Yellow Pages, Walk-Ins, etc. A common source of patients is often other patients. You may create a referral source called "Other Patients", or something similar, but if you want to track your individual patients by name, a special method is provided to accomplish this. You will not be entering individual patients names using the screen seen above. This will be discussed in more detail shortly.

Entering Referral Sources
To enter a new referral source, click on the New button on the Referral Source Entry screen. You are first asked to designate if this is an Individual or Organization. Use Individual if the referral source is a person such as a referring physician or dentist. When you select Individual, the screen will display appropriate fields such as First Name, Last Name, Specialty, etc. If the referral source is not a person, select Organization. Examples of organizations would be Yellow Pages, Teachers Unions, Newspaper Ads, HMO's, etc. The referral source's address and telephone and a comment may also be entered.

Referral Category
Each referral source will be placed in a category. You will be creating your own categories. An example of a referral category would be "Doctors." The referral sources would be the individual doctors that you have entered but they would all have the same category which is Doctor. Another example could be "Advertising." Under the Advertising category you might place the referral sources of Yellow Pages and Newspaper Ad.

Selecting A Patient's Referral Source
Referral sources are selected on a patient by patient basis. That is, members of the same account may have separate referral sources. The referral source is selected on the Patient Entry screen where there is a drop down list entitled Referral Source. Click this to drop down a list of all your entered referral sources. Then select the appropriate source. If the proper referral source has not yet been entered, click on the Add/Edit Referrals. You can access the Referral Source Entry screen using this button to add to your library of referral sources. After adding the referral source you may select the proper source for this patient via the Referral Source drop down list on the Patient Entry screen.